'Selling' Eiffel

Good(morning|day|evening),

Info:
====
We currently have presentations on programming languages on the principals
of programming languages.
We are analysing it on conceptual issues like: Polymorphism, overloading,
coercion, dynamic/static type checking, parameter passing, exception
handling, etc.
[I already have read some interesting papers to get 84% of all type
checking --> static]

But as I'm sort of "selling" the language to a class of Computer Science
students, I wanted to know which features, heroic stories, quirks I
defininately cannot miss.
Therefore the following questions..

Questions:
=======
- Why (smart)eiffel? [I personaly like to see the generated toy-C-code,
Design by Contract, etc.]
- What is (smart)eiffel famous of? [Coming from Smalltalk --> Everything
is an object?]
- What nice/strange stories can be told of the evaluation of the language?
- etc..

What story *must* I tell.
What features I *cannot* miss?


Thnx in advance for your (extra) insight in the matter Eiffel.

--
Vriendelijke Groet,

Roderick
--
TRIPLE IT
straat://Pettemerstraat 12A
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plaats://Alkmaar
tel://+31(0)72-5129516
fax://+31(0)72-5129520
http://www.triple-it.nl "Laat uw Net Werken!"

"Roderick Groesbeek" <news@roderick.triple-it.nl> wrote in message
news:47507eba$0$233$e4fe514c@news.xs4all.nl...
>
> What story *must* I tell.
> What features I *cannot* miss?
>

I forgot which languages we already 'sold' :-)
In upcoming age, and stuff I liked....
- Fortran
Did you know that the common used for-loop variables i,j,k are coming
from the language Fortran?
If you needed an 'integer' they were already available, and _only_ those.
That's why we always use i,j,k :-)
- Cobol
Opencobol, and some nice/strange 'Perform' magic keyword that does it
all! (For, while, if, etc)
- Lisp
Dynamic only. Autocad is programmed in it!? And of course used in Emacs.
And the base of ML, Scheme.
- Pascal
Unit introduction. (Design by interface?) Famous Turbo Pascal popularity
with DOS of course.
- Postscript
Reverse polish notation. ( 2 3 mul and /x 4 def, etc)
ps2ps ps2ascii ps2pdf
- Smalltalk
Everything is an object. Object is everything.
- Ada
[Not treated (sold) yet :-]
- Rexx
Invented by IBM for the mainframes
- Tcl/TK
[Not treated (sold) yet :-]

And of course we are implementing in every language a heapsort algorithm and
will benchmark it against each other
[Languages coming up: Perl, Haskell, Eiffel, PHP, VRML, Ruby, Javascript,
C#, Erlang, D]


--
Vriendelijke Groet,

Roderick
--
TRIPLE IT
straat://Pettemerstraat 12A
postcode://1823 CW
plaats://Alkmaar
tel://+31(0)72-5129516
fax://+31(0)72-5129520
http://www.triple-it.nl "Laat uw Net Werken!"

> - Why (smart)eiffel? [I personaly like to see the generated toy-C-code,
> Design by Contract, etc.]

Eiffel. Because there aren't so many object oriented garbage
collected,
native compiling (non VM), fast languages with generics (well in fact
there
was no other before the raise of D).

SmallEiffel was a good start but the move to SmartEiffel a total
desaster and the later
is complete unuseable because the compile time of serious programs (>
150-200 KLoc is insane).

Still using my own heavily patched (around 40% of the code changed/
replaced)
SmallEiffel clone. It works fine now but i had to spend all together
around a 3/4 year
full time work.

> - What is (smart)eiffel famous of? [Coming from Smalltalk --> Everything
> is an object?]

Having the most incompetent team with the most stupid design decision
in the history
of programming language. Breaking even simple things that the constant
'1' wasn't
an INTEGER anymore.

> - What nice/strange stories can be told of the evaluation of the language?
> - etc..

Sucked like OS/2 on marketing. Compilers were terrible and expensive
until late 90ies.
And it was to heavy to work on slower computers of this area
(compiling time not runtime).
Also GC was only real valued after the raise of Java in 2000 and at
this time
Eiffel was already doomed because Java kicked them out of the Business
like Smalltalk.

> What story *must* I tell.

The story about DbC.

> What features I *cannot* miss?

DbC. Good Generics and a consistent not feature overloaded language
design - it was called
a RISC language for a good reason.

Also talk about agents as a different flavour then closures (agents
are what i call
'call by value' Closures).

Eiffel is good but unfortunately there is no great future. Well for my
inhouse production
i don't have any intensions in the next decade to move away from
Eiffel (unless we have huge
changes in CPU technologies). But for all new projects you should
really look somewhere else
(my favorite for anything like this would be D 2.0 - 1.0 not useable
for me because they don't
have closures at the moment).

You can check out my program Arachno Ruby (http://www.ruby-ide.com) it
is written 90% in
SmallEiffel and 10% in C/C++. It's the only larger program and the
only serious GUI program
that exists in SmallEiffel.

Roderick Groesbeek schreef:
> "Roderick Groesbeek" <news@roderick.triple-it.nl> wrote in message
> news:47507eba$0$233$e4fe514c@news.xs4all.nl...
>>
>> What story *must* I tell.
>> What features I *cannot* miss?

Can’t really help you with Eiffel (yet), I’m afraid, but:

> - Fortran
> Did you know that the common used for-loop variables i,j,k are coming
> from the language Fortran?

No. They come from mathematics. Fortran, being written by
mathematicians, took it over. i is just the first letter of index, and
j,k, … just follow it.

> - Postscript
> Reverse polish notation. ( 2 3 mul and /x 4 def, etc)
> ps2ps ps2ascii ps2pdf

PS is a descendant of Forth, wouldn’t it be better to talk about Forth
instead?

H.
--
Hendrik Maryns
http://tcl.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~hendrik/
==================
http://aouw.org
Ask smart questions, get good answers:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html


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